Much as he liked his new geography, however, he had grown violently angry over the first lesson and declared with strong language that it was all a lie! The master had read aloud to him the first lesson, which describes the earth as one of the planets that revolve round the sun, and which says that it is a globe or sphere, turning on its axis once in twenty-four hours and so causing day and night. Old Zack listened incredulously. "I don't believe a word of that!" he declared flatly. The master labored with him for some time, trying to convince him that the earth is round and moves, but it was quite in vain. "No such thing!" old Zack exclaimed. "I know better! That's the biggest lie that ever was told!" He quite took it to heart and continued talking about it after school. He really seemed to believe that a great and dangerous delusion had gone abroad. "It's wrong," he said, "puttin' sich stuff as that into young ones' heads. It didn't oughter be 'lowed!" What old Zack was saying about the earth spread abroad and caused a great deal of amusement. Certain waggish persons began to "josh" him and others tried to argue with him, but all such attempts merely roused his native obstinacy. One Sunday evening he gave a somewhat wrong direction to the weekly prayer meeting by rising to warn the people that their children were being taught a pack of lies; and such was his vehemence that the regular Sabbath service resolved itself into a heated debate on the contour of the earth. Perhaps old Zack believed that, as a recently educated man, it had become his duty to set things right in the public mind. The day before school closed he went to his late antagonist, the lawyer on the school board, and again offered to pay the twenty dollars for his tuition. After formally expelling him from school, however, the board did not dare to accept the money, and old Zack gave it to the long-suffering Master Cobb. CHAPTER VI THE SAD ABUSE OF OLD MEHITABLE About this time there occurred a domestic episode with which Halstead was imperishably connected in the family annals. In those days the family butter was churned in the kitchen by hand power, and often laboriously, in an upright dasher churn which Addison and Theodora had christened Old Mehitable. The butter had been a long time coming one morning; but finally the cream which for an hour or more had been thick, white and mute beneath the dasher strokes began to swash in a peculiar way, giving forth after each stroke a sound that they thought resembled, _Mehitable--Mehitable--Mehitable_. That old churn was said to be sixty-six years old even then. There was little to wear out in the old-fashioned dasher churns, made as they were of well-seasoned pine or spruce, with a "butter cup" turned from a solid block of birch or maple, and the dasher staff of strong white ash. One of them sometimes outlasted two generations of housewives; they were simple, durable and easily kept clean, but hard to operate.